HP's Open WebOS Releases in Beta Mode

HP today announced the launch of its Open webOS beta version - the beginning of a new venture for the company.

Almost nine months after Hewlett-Packard announced its plan to contribute its webOS platform to the open-source community, the company on Friday set off the streamers to celebrate its beta release.

"It has taken a lot of hard work, long hours and weekend sacrifices by our engineering team to deliver on our promise and we have accomplished this goal," the company said in a blog post.

The beta release of the mobile OS offers 54 open-source webOS componentsor 450,000 lines of code under the Apache 2.0 license in two build environments: A desktop build and the OpenEmbedded build. Now developers, partners, HP engineers, and other hardware manufacturers can add their own spin on the mobile OS.

The desktop build, according to HP, "provides the ideal development environment for enhancing the webOS user experience with new features and integrating state of the art open source technologies." With the new open-source option, developers can now use all of their desktop tools on powerful development machines, the company said.

The OpenEmbedded build offers a better climate for porting webOS to new and existing devices, HP said.

"No Beta release would be complete without a full complement of ways for the community to contribute and engage with us," HP's announcement said. The company encouraged developers to join an online group to discuss things like porting, and to submit and track bugs and feature requests.

Earlier this month, HP announced a "new brand" with the reintroduction of its webOS Global Business Unit (GBU) as Gram.

"We are no longer a consumer hardware brand, we are a different company with a focus on software, user experience, cloud, engineering, and partnering," HP chief of staff Martin Risau said in an Aug. 14 statement.

HP's excitement over the new Open webOS continues to build, the blog said, as the team approaches version 1.0 and beyond.

Stephanie began as a PCMag reporter in May 2012. She moved to New York City from Frederick, Md., where she worked for four years as a multimedia reporter at the second-largest daily newspaper in Maryland. She interned at Baltimore magazine and graduated from Indiana University of Pennsylvania (in the town of Indiana, in the state of Pennsylvania) with a degree in journalism and mass communications.
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